One of my colleagues has just finished telling me the story of his weekend.
Late on Sunday evening he was driving home with his wife, daughter and dog when he had a problem with his car.
Overtaking in the outside lane of the M3 his car lost all its power and he had to manoeuvre it through the traffic onto the hard shoulder and safety.
He was rescued by a combination of Motorway and AA services and managed to get his family home later that evening.
This morning the car was taken into the garage. The garage mechanic took quite some time to explain all of the things that might have gone wrong to cause this problem.
Many of the complexities of modern day car engines were described and discussed alongside the possible solutions that might be employed to put it right.
I asked my colleague if he understood and he freely confessed it went right over his head.
This got both of thinking about how our clients feel when we start to describe in technical detail how we are going to solve, for example, their retirement income needs.
Do they really want to hear about all of the different ways in which a pension pot might be converted into retirement income?
Or are they more interested in the fact that we can fix their problem for them and get them back onto the retirement road?
I suspect that for a lot of people it is the latter.
They want to know that they are going to be all right. They don’t necessarily want to know what we as the equivalent of financial services mechanics are going to do to their pension pot to make it work for them.
In some respects it would be rather like the mechanic handing me some overalls and a set of spanners and making me slide under the car to fix the engine with him standing over me giving me instructions.
This has really got me thinking about how we deliver our Financial Planning advice.
From now on I am going to concentrate more on solutions and less on explaining the nuances of every single possible mechanical choice.
I’m going to get my client’s pension working for them so that they can get home safely
